Good Morning!
First and most importantly: my annual t-shirt charity drive is now live; all proceeds benefit our friends at 826 National. This year’s shirt focuses on the 8th wonder of the world: S3. Much more to come over the next week; be sure to get yours before time runs out.
In other news, I’ve published a trailer video for re:Quinnvent, my own sideshow physical/virtual event around AWS re:Invent. If you’re looking to either figure out what’s going on this year at AWS’s carnival of containers, or get your product or service in front of an audience who cares about that, check out requinnvent.com.
From the Community
Are you willing to pay $430K for a stranger’s cryptocoins? Well, that’s what some companies had to fork out in cloud bills when notorious threat actor TeamTNT hijacked their cloud resources to mine just $8,100 in crypto coins.
Stay ahead of these menaces. Get the latest threat intel from Sysdig on how attackers have evolved their techniques to steal your cloud resources for no good!
Skyplane: Optimizing Transfer Cost and Throughput Using Cloud-Aware Overlays sounds like a product pitch, but check it out; it’s a full-on academic paper!
Why we use Terraform and not Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Pulumi, or CloudFormation is a great post (recently updated, don’t let the first date on the article fool you) that’s determined to upset DevRel folks at every one of those companies excepting Pulumi–as they’ve just seen a mass exodus of what appears to be "their entire DevRel team."
Apparently I’m not the only one who’s increasingly annoyed with cloud data transfer fees. SiliconAngle has more.
Chris Farris has a post on How to approach Tailscale security and compliance –specifically its applicability to the enterprise. Go read this. Seriously, go read it right now.
My business partner went off on a rant about Why Cloud Finance Is Broken and Ineffective and I regret to inform you that he’s correct.
Is learning serverless really that hard? writes Jeremy Daly. If you’re Jeremy Daly, of course not. If you’re a mere mortal like the rest of us… yes. There are some teething issues remaining on the learning curve. (I endorse this post very much; go read it.)
My screed on A Brief History of Kubernetes, Its Use Cases, and Its Problems continues to uh… drive emails to my inbox, to put it mildly.
Before there was Corey Quinn the shitposter, "analyst," consultant, DevOps person, etc… there was Corey Quinn the FreeBSD admin. Colin has done amazing work getting FreeBSD onto Amazon’s lightweight hypervisor.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Brief History of Kubernetes, Its Use Cases, and Its Problems
Last Week In AWS: Azure: Less a Cloud Than Performance Art
Last Week In AWS: Blame Steven Postmortems
Screaming in the Cloud: Consulting the Aspiring Consultant with Mike Julian
Screaming in the Cloud: The Evolution of Cloud Services with Richard Hartmann
Choice Cuts
Managing shards. Maintenance windows. Overprovisioning. ElastiCache bills. shudder It’s time for caching to be simpler. Momento Serverless Cache lets you forget the backend to focus on good code and great user experiences. With true autoscaling and a pay-per-use pricing model, it makes caching easy. No matter your cloud provider, start free with Momento Serverless Cache today.
Amazon CloudFront adds fields for origin latency and ASN in real-time logs for more granular insights – This seems good until you remember that you’re charged for ingest and storage of logs by the GB; every log entry just got a bit larger!
Amazon EC2 adds Service Quotas for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) – But sadly, not a correct pronunciation guide for "AMI."
Amazon WorkDocs adds support for Apple Silicon MacBooks – I’m writing this on a Mac Studio desktop right now; the world isn’t entirely laptops yet, Amazon.
AWS Control Tower now available in GovCloud (US) Regions – Federal Control Tower is going to upset some States Rights folks I suspect.
Announcing increased AWS IAM Identity Center default quota values – With up to 100,000 users and 100,000 groups able to be assigned to as many as 3,000 applications, this is a strong contender for Best New Database Service of 2022.
Announcing AWS Parameters and Secrets Lambda Extension – At press time, I can’t figure out how to actually implement this, so a theoretically very handy extension is currently a pipe dream for me.
Announcing Camera Stream Pause and Resume on AWS Panorama – This new feature was clearly requested by someone in the early stages of planning a bank heist.
Announcing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Workstation on AWS – Is anyone actually using RHEL workstations in 2022? Feels like a relic of a bygone era, but I’m thrilled to be corrected.
Announcing Remote Reboot for AWS Panorama – Walking across the factory floor to power cycle a camera–as a service.
How can I get insights into my portfolio with AWS Cost Explorer? – Probably in much the same way as you can fix a wristwatch that’s losing time with a claw hammer, in my experience.
Migrate Google Cloud for MySQL to Amazon Aurora MySQL – Some dim bulb at each cloud provider came up with the "idea" that the best source of new business was to steal workloads from other providers rather than focusing on net new business or migrating existing workloads in, and now we’re stuck with nonsense like this.
Host code-server on Amazon SageMaker – "Let’s reimagine Code9 with a better editor and way more expensive!" If it were less expensive, it would be under the LightSail umbrella.
Working backwards from Vision Zero to improve road safety – Nearly one in five Amazon delivery drivers were injured in 2021, not to mention how many third parties were killed. Note as well that Amazon deliberately outsources delivery to a sea of contractors in a move designed to cut costs and liability. So I don’t want to hear anything from Amazon about "improving road safety" until it addresses this very large elephant in the room.
Changes to AWS Certification exam delivery – Pearson Vue (motto: "Keep your hands where we can see them!") has done such a good job of alienating test-takers that they’re now the sole administrator of AWS certification exams.
Tools
Push your code when it’s ready, launch it when you are ready, and most importantly: log off you’re ready and not worry about your coworkers calling you at 3AM and screaming you the songs of their people, specifically "Rage in D Minor." Take control of your launches with AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, and stop causing problems for other people on purpose.
aws-logs-comptroller cleans out orphaned CloudWatch Log groups. I’ve been looking for something like this for ages!
agg isn’t a traditional cloud tool, but it’s great if you want to create an animated gif of a console demo. And please: document your cloudy stuff better than you currently do. Yes, I’m subtweeting absolutely everyone right now.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
